Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  Keeping his impatience under control for Meredith’s sake, Matt said flatly, “It’s not what I’d have picked either, but if we wanted to eat in peace, it had to be somewhere relatively dark and out of the way.”

  “Parker, it’s going to be fun,” Meredith promised, and she really did like it—the English atmosphere and the upbeat music being played by a live band.

  “The band is good,” Lisa agreed, leaning forward in her chair and watching the musicians. A moment later her eyes widened as Matt’s chauffeur sauntered into the lounge and sat down on a stool at the far end of the bar. “Matt,” she said with laughing incredulity, “I think your chauffeur just decided to come in out of the cold and have a beer.”

  Without looking in that direction, Matt replied, “Joe drinks Coke not beer, when he’s on duty.”

  A waiter appeared to take their drinks order, and Meredith decided there was no need to inform Lisa that Joe was also a bodyguard, especially not when she preferred to forget that herself.

  “Will that be all, folks?” the waiter asked, and when they told him it was, he walked over to the end of the bar. He was starting to hand the order over to the bartender, when a short man wearing an unusually bulky overcoat walked up beside him and said, “How’d you like to make a quick hundred bucks, buddy?”

  The waiter swung around. “How?”

  “Just let me stand over there behind that trellis for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got yourself some important guests at one of those tables, and I’ve got myself a camera under this coat.” He held out his hand, and in it was a press pass showing that he was employed by a well-known tabloid, and a neatly folded $100 bill.

  “Stay out of sight,” the waiter said, palming the money.

  At the maître d’s desk in the front foyer, the owner of the restaurant picked up the phone and dialed the home phone number of Noel Jaffe, who rated restaurants in his newspaper column. “Noel,” he said, turning his shoulder a little to avoid being overheard by the new crowd of customers coming in the doors, “this is Alex over at the Manchester House. You remember I told you someday I’d repay you for the nice write-up you gave my place in your column? Well, guess who’s sitting in my restaurant right now.”

  “No kidding.” Jaffe laughed when Alex told him who they were. “Maybe they are the happy little family they seemed like at that press conference.”

  “Not tonight, they aren’t,” Alex said, his whisper rising a little. “The fiancé has a face on him like a storm cloud, and he’s had plenty to drink.”

  There was a brief, thoughtful pause, and then Jaffe chuckled and said, “I’ll be right there with a photographer. Find us a table where we can see without being seen.”

  “No problem. Just remember—when you write about this, spell the name of my place right and put in the address.”

  Alex hung up the phone, so delighted with the prospect of free publicity about Chicago’s rich and famous eating in his restaurant, he called several radio and television stations too.

  By the time the waiter brought the second round of drinks—and the third for Parker—Meredith was well aware that Parker was drinking too much, too fast. That in itself wouldn’t have been quite so alarming if he wasn’t also determined to infuse the conversation with a steady stream of little vignettes about things he and Meredith had done, most of them beginning with “Remember when . . .”

  Meredith didn’t always remember, and she was, moreover, becoming increasingly aware that Matt was getting angry.

  Matt wasn’t getting angry, he was already coldly furious. For three quarters of an hour he’d been forced to listen to Reynolds relating cute tales about himself and Meredith, designed to point out to Matt that he was, hopelessly and irrevocably, Meredith’s and Reynolds’s social inferior, no matter how much money he had. Included among them was a story about the time Meredith broke her tennis racquet in a doubles tournament she played with him at the country club when she was a teenager . . . another about some damned dance given by some ritzy private school where she’d dropped her necklace . . . and yet another about a polo game he’d recently taken her to.

  When he started talking about a charity auction they’d worked on together, Meredith stood up quickly. “I’m going to the ladies’ room,” she said, deliberately interrupting Parker. Lisa stood up too. “I’ll go with you.”

  As soon as they reached the ladies’ room, Meredith walked over to the sink, bracing her hands on the tiled counter in a posture of complete misery. “I can’t stand much more of this,” she told Lisa. “I never imagined tonight would be as bad as this.”

  “Should I pretend I’m sick and make them take us home?” Lisa said, grinning as she leaned forward to reapply her lipstick. “Remember when you did that for me that time we double-dated when we were at Bensonhurst?”

  “Parker wouldn’t care if we both passed out at his feet tonight,” Meredith said irritably. “He’s too busy doing everything he can to provoke Matt into an argument.”

  The tube of lipstick in Lisa’s hand stilled, and she shot Meredith an irate sideways glance. “Matt is goading him!”

  “He isn’t saying a word!”

  “That is how he’s goading him. Matt is leaning back in his chair, watching Parker like he’s a performing clown! Parker isn’t used to losing, and he’s lost you. And Matt is sitting there, silently gloating because he knows he’s going to win.”

  “I cannot believe you!” Meredith burst out in a low, angry voice. “For years you’ve criticized Parker when he was right. Now he’s wrong and he’s drunk, and you’re taking his side! Furthermore, Matt hasn’t won anything. And he is not gloating. He may be trying to look bored and amused by Parker’s antics, but he isn’t! Believe me, he’s angry—really angry because Parker is making him look like a—a social outcast.”

  “That’s the way you see it,” Lisa said with such fierce indignation that Meredith stepped back in astonishment. It turned to guilt as Lisa added, “I don’t know how you could have considered marrying a man for whom you haven’t the least bit of sympathy!”

  The waiter had just told Matt that his table was ready, and over his shoulder Matt saw Lisa and Meredith emerge from the ladies’ room and wend their way through the crowded lounge.

  Parker had stopped talking about the things he and Meredith had done and was now thoroughly antagonizing Matt by questioning him about his background and sneering at Matt’s answers. “Tell me, Farrell,” he said in a loud, slurred voice that made several people at neighboring tables turn around, “where did you go to college? I’ve forgotten.”

  “Indiana State,” Matt bit out, watching Lisa and Meredith.

  “I went to Princeton.”

  “So what!”

  “I was just curious. What about sports? Did you play any?”

  “No,” he clipped, sliding back his chair and standing up so that the four of them could go to their table in the dining room as soon as the women arrived.

  “What did you do with your free time?” Parker persisted, sliding back his chair and standing up, too, a little unsteadily.

  “I worked.”

  “Where?”

  “In the steel mills and as a mechanic.”

  “I played some polo, boxed a little bit. And,” he added with a disdainful look down Matt’s entire length, “I gave Meredith her first kiss.”

  “I took her virginity,” Matt snapped back, baited past endurance, but his eyes were on Meredith and Lisa, who were less than ten feet away.

  “You son of a bitch!” Parker hissed, and, drawing back his arm, he aimed a punch at Matt.

  Matt barely saw it coming in time to avoid it. Reacting instinctively, he threw up his left arm and swung hard with his right. Pandemonium erupted; women screamed, men jumped out of their chairs, Parker crashed to the floor, and white lights exploded in the background. Lisa called him a bastard, Matt looked toward her, and a small fist connected with his eye at the same instant Meredith bent down t
o help Parker off the floor. Matt instinctively drew back his fist to return the blow, realized it was Lisa who’d hit him, and checked the motion, but his elbow connected with something hard behind him and Meredith cried out. Joe was hurtling forward, plowing through the fleeing diners, and Matt caught Lisa’s wrists to stop the hellcat from punching him again while photographers appeared out of nowhere, crowding in for more shots. With his free hand Matt yanked Meredith away from Parker’s prone body and thrust her at Joe. “Get her out of here!” he yelled, trying to block her from view of the cameras with his own body. “Take her home!”

  Suddenly Meredith felt herself being half lifted off her feet and shoved through the shouting crowd toward the kitchen’s swinging doors. “There’s a back way out,” Joe panted, dragging her in his wake past startled cooks hovering over steaming pots and gaping waiters with loaded dinner trays. He threw his shoulder at the back door, sending it flying open and crashing against the back of the brick building, and they plunged into the frigid night air and into the rear parking lot, ignoring the parking lot attendant. Jerking the door of the limo open, Joe shoved her into the back of it and down onto the floor. “Stay down,” he shouted, already slamming her door and running for the driver’s door.

  In a blur of unreality, Meredith stared at the fuzzy threads of the dark blue carpet a half inch from her wide eyes, unable to believe this was happening! Refusing to cower on the floor, she shoved herself upward, trying to crawl into the seat just as the car engine roared to life. The Cadillac blasted out of the parking lot, tires screaming, careening around the corner on two wheels, dumping Meredith back onto the floor in an ignominious heap. Streetlights flew by the windows in a white blur as the car raced crazily down one street and up another, and it belatedly occurred to her that they weren’t circling and going back to the restaurant for Lisa.

  Gingerly, she crawled up into the seat that faced the rear of the car, so that she could order Matt’s maniac chauffeur to slow down and go back. “Excuse me—Joe,” she called, but he was either too busy breaking the speed limit and traffic laws to hear her, or the blaring horns from irate motorists they were cutting off had drowned out her voice. With an angry sigh Meredith got up onto her knees, leaned her chest against the seat back, and poked her head through the connecting window. “Joe,” she said, her voice breaking with fear as they swerved onto the right shoulder and passed a semi truck with only inches between them. “Please! You’re scaring me!”

  “Don’t you worry none, Miz Farrell,” he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror, “ain’t nobody goin’ to stop us. Even if they could catch us, they won’t bother us, because I’m packin’.”

  “Packing?” Meredith repeated numbly, glancing at the empty seat beside him, half expecting to see an open suitcase. “Packing what?”

  “A rod.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m packin’ a rod,” he reiterated.

  “You’re going fishing? Now?”

  He let out a sharp bark of laughter, shook his big head, and by way of explanation he pulled open his black suit coat. “I’m packin’ a rod,” he repeated, and Meredith stared in wide-eyed horror at the butt of the handgun that protruded from a lethal-looking shoulder holster.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed and, turning limply, she slid back down on the seat and devoted herself to agonizing over Lisa’s fate. In her current frame of mind she didn’t particularly care if Matt and Parker both spent the night in jail for disturbing the peace, but she was worried about Lisa. Meredith had seen Parker swing at Matt first; she had no doubt who’d started the fistfight, but she also saw Parker miss his target, and she wasn’t the least bit inclined to forgive Matt, who was sober, for turning a missed, drunken punch into a barroom brawl! Lisa, Meredith recalled, had been fiddling with the catch on her purse at about the time Parker had swung at Matt, and she’d looked up only when someone screamed—just in time to see Matt floor Parker. Which was why she’d launched herself into the fray out of some misbegotten—and incomprehensible—desire to defend Parker, whom she’d always seemed to dislike. The entire scenario passed before Meredith’s eyes, and if she weren’t so disgusted with the lot of them, she’d have laughed at the memory of Lisa drawing back her fist to poke Matt right in the eye. Having a lot of brothers certainly paid off at such times, Meredith decided grimly. She had no idea if Lisa had actually connected with her target, because, at the time, she herself had been bending down to help Parker up, and when she looked up, Matt’s elbow had smacked her in the eye. It dawned on her then that the area around her right eye felt funny and she touched her fingertips to it. It felt tender.

  A few minutes later she jumped when the phone rang, its ordinary sound glaringly out of place in a fleeing Cadillac limousine being driven by a man who was probably an ex-mobster.

  “It’s for you,” Joe called cheerfully. “It’s Matt. They got out of the restaurant okay. Everyone’s fine. He wants to talk to you.”

  The news that Matt was calling her now, after everything he’d put her through, had an effect on Meredith like spontaneous combustion. She jerked the phone out of its built-in cradle in the side panel and put it to her ear. “Joe says you’re fine,” Matt began, his deep voice subdued. “I have your coat and—” Meredith didn’t hear the rest of what he said. Very slowly, very deliberately, and with infinite satisfaction, she hung up on him.

  Ten minutes later, when the curb in front of her apartment building was already racing by the side windows, Matt’s chauffeur finally slammed on the brakes and, with all the delicacy of a pilot landing a 727 on the far end of a short runway, he brought the car to a teeth-jarring stop. Having failed to kill her on the highway or cause her to die of fright, he then got out of the car while it was still rocking, opened the back door with a flourish, and, with a satisfied grin, announced, “Here we are, Miz Farrell, safe and sound.”

  Meredith doubled up her fist.

  Thirty years of civilized behavior and good breeding could not be overcome, however, so she forced her fingers to relax, climbed out of the car on legs that shook like jelly, and courteously, if dishonestly, wished him a good night. She walked into the building, escorted by Joe, who insisted he had to do it, and everyone in the lobby turned to stare at her askance—the doorman, the desk guard, and several tenants who were returning from an early evening. “G-good evening, Miss Bancroft,” the desk guard babbled, gaping at her open-mouthed.

  Meredith assumed her appearance must be a sight. She put up her chin and brazened it out. “Good evening, Terry,” she replied with a gracious smile while yanking her arm from Joe’s protective grasp.

  A few moments later, however, when she unlocked her apartment door and saw herself reflected in the foyer mirror, she stopped dead, her eyes widening, her breath catching on a burst of horrified laughter. Her hair was standing straight out on one side, and the other side looked like it had been arranged with an electric mixer; her bolero jacket, which had looked pert earlier, was hanging drunkenly off the back of one shoulder, and the ascot tie was slung over the other shoulder. “Very nice,” she sarcastically informed her reflection, and closed the apartment door.

  “I should really go home,” Parker said, gingerly rubbing his sore jaw. “It’s eleven o’clock.”

  “Your place will be crawling with news people,” Lisa told him firmly. “You may as well stay here tonight.”

  “What about Meredith?” he said a few minutes later when she returned from the kitchen and handed him another cup of tea.

  Lisa felt a funny ache in her heart at his frustrating concentration on a woman who was not in love with him and who was, moreover, the last woman in the world he should be in love with. “Parker,” she said softly, “it’s over.”

  He lifted his head and looked at her in the muted light from the lamp, realizing she was referring to his future with Meredith. “I know,” he said somberly.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Lisa continued, sitting beside him. Parker noticed, not for th
e first time, the way lamplight struck ruby lights off her hair. “The relationship was comfortable for you and Meredith, but do you know what happens to comfortable after a few years?”

  “No, what?”

  “It degenerates to dull.”

  Without answering, he drank the tea and put the mug down, then he looked around her living room because he felt an odd reluctance to look at her. The room was an eclectic combination of starkly modern and charmingly traditional, with unusual art pieces thrown in. It was like her—daring, dazzling, unsettling. An Aztec mask stood upon a modernistic mirrored pedestal beside a chair upholstered in pale peach leather with a basket of ivy next to it. The mirror above the fireplace was modern American; the Chelsea porcelain figurines on the mantel were English. Restless and uneasy with the questions drifting persistently through his mind, Parker stood up and went over to the fireplace to inspect the porcelain figurines. “This is beautiful,” he said sincerely. “Seventeenth century, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lisa said quietly.

  He came back and stopped in front of her, gazing down at her but carefully keeping his eyes from the cleavage above the bright plum V of her dress, then he asked the question that baffled him the most. “What made you take a swing at Farrell, Lisa?”

  Lisa started and stood up abruptly, picking up the cup. “I don’t know,” she lied, angry because his nearness in the apartment, the implied and longed-for intimacy of his being there, was making her voice tremble.

  “You can’t stand me, yet you went leaping to my defense like an avenging angel,” Parker persisted. “Why?”

  Swallowing, Lisa debated about what to tell him; whether to shrug the question off with a joke about his need for a defender, or whether to risk everything and tell him the truth before some other woman grabbed him again. He was puzzled and he wanted an explanation, but she knew instinctively he didn’t want or anticipate an avowal of love. “What makes you think I can’t stand you?”